Roger Federer could not help letting forth just a hint of
smugness as he told Andrew Murray that it was okay to cry a
little after losing the final match of the Australian Open,
oh-three. He has been there, after all, soaked with tears when
Rafael Nadal won here last year. This time he owned the
tournament from start to finish. In the final, it was not even
close, even if Murray reached set point two or three times in the
third and held on for a long tie-breaker. Still, the level of
play showed that it was not a blow out. Murray gave the Swiss
superman a much tougher match than anyone else in the tournament,
notably Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who surprisingly played like a
doormat in the semi-final, after raising expectations that he
would do much better when he won a dramatic match, with brilliant
rallies, against the Serb Novak Djokovic, the ‘08 winner.
Djokovic, Davidenko, Tsongas, Roddick, Isner, Del Potro,
Nadal: there was supposed to be a fine gentlemen’s lineup going
into the first major tournament of the 2010 season, and the
mighty Federer, following an excellent season during which,
despite losses in the Australian and U.S. Opens, he showed he was
still the man to beat, was by consensus tops but beatable.
Beatable by Murray, precisely — especially when Nadal and Del
Potro, Federer-slayers at the ‘09 Australian and U.S. opens,
respectively, retired with injuries.
Last year, Roger Federer won the championships at
Roland-Garros and Wimbledon, the back-to-back classics that gave
him the most wins in the Open era, which dates from 1968. With
these wins, he became, statistically speaking, the greatest
player of the Open era. Some would say of all time, but that
would be a matter of judgment, because in terms of stats, it is
impossible to compare the kinds of numbers that players like
Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Pete Sampras, or, now, Roger Federer,
pile up to the career of, most tellingly, Pancho Gonzales, who
turned pro almost immediately and went on to dominate everybody
he played well into his 40s and even 50s, but without victories
in the great, famous, glorious, attention-getting, and
numbers-keeping national invitational tournaments in tennis’ four
oldest homelands.
In logical terms, statistics do not lie. Tennis is one on
one and the court is always the same, though admittedly it can be
windy or hot or something else and of course the surfaces vary.
But everyone is on the same courts. In baseball you have the rest
of the team and all kinds of ballparks. A pitcher’s ERA and
win/loss records cannot mean the same thing as wins in tennis
tournaments. Sixteen grand slams is more than 14 grand slams
(Federer and Sampras) and that, my friends, is that. And yet, no,
it is not that. What about the competition? Not unlike the long
cycles of climate change, of which the Al Gores of this world
seem to be unaware, there are cycles of champions in sports, and
it may well be we are in a valley-period for tennis players, as
we have been for outfielders, first and second basemen for at
least five or six years now.
Federer is a uniquely gifted player, however, and the best
evidence of this lies in the way he dispatched Tsonga and Murray
in successive three-set matches. The Frenchman and the Scot both
had fine tournaments, which did not lead to predictions either
man would beat Federer, but did make for analyses that either
could beat him. Coulda ain’t enough, as we say in the Bronx, but
I have to admit almost anyone would have been justified in
expecting at least one of those matches to go five sets and both
of them to easily go to four.
In his win against the young Croat champion Marin Cilic,
Murray showed the grit and drive that have made him the Great
British Hope for the past two years, as well as a new level of
technical mastery that suggested he might be ready to win his
first major. Cilic, who defeated Andy Roddick in five sets,
demonstrated plenty of grit himself, but Murray, after letting
the young Croat champion take the first set, outplayed him with a
deft combination of returns-down-the-line and brilliant net
play.
Djokovic, who defeated Tsonga in 2008 for the Australian
championship, met him in the quarter-final, and this time it
seemed as if Tsonga’s sheer stamina and speed, which overcame the
Serb in the fifth set (6-1), might give Federer the kind of slip
that Rafa Nadal gave him in last year’s final. Stamina and speed,
however, are Federer’s middle names, so much so that you scarcely
notice them. Except on the rare recent occasions when for
whatever reason he is unnerved, as he clearly was during the ‘09
U.S. Open final against the dashing Del Potro, Federer gives the
supremely confident and masterful impression — like Pete Sampras
and John McEnroe — of not really trying. That is because he is
so completely on top of the game, analyzing his opponent like a
computer and moving with feet like a ballet dancer on a body that
rarely seems to be straining, that you literally do not expect
him to miss. He makes superbly timed uses of his first-serve
aces, sends his opponent off-balance with deadly cross courts,
and controls the rhythm of play.
Andy Murray is only 22, and it is obvious that he is
improving not year by year but tournament by tournament. When he
finally catches Federer it will be of some comfort to British
tennis fans, who are kind of like Chicago Cubs fans. However,
they have some nerve, when you think about it, to lament the fact
that they have not had a champion since Fred Perry. Perry, the
greatest player of the mid-1930s until the American Don Budge
took his place, was a superb competitor and a ladies man who had
liaisons (and marriages) with several of the world’s most
fabulous women, such as Marlene Dietrich. He remains one of the
handful-and-one men to have won all the major championships. But
because he was not a public school boy, the officials of British
tennis were rude to him and all but told him to get lost. Which
he did, becoming first a pro, then an American citizen (he served
in the Army Air Force during World War II), then one of the most
successful sports-to-clothes men — like Rene Lacoste, the
legendary French champion — in the history of capitalist
enterprise.
There’ll always be an England and all that, and class
snobbery may even have had its uses (what is certain is that
Pakistan was a lot quieter when Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen
were in charge of that dreadful place), but claiming to miss Fred
Perry requires a certain kind of English chutzpah, and keep in
mind that Murray is a Scot.
However, tennis is a fine game. While it is interesting to
see that there are now some sharp little Chinese girls out there
giving it the old college try on the ladies’ side, the showdown
was predictable, with the ferociously competitive, superb athlete
Serena Williams once again taking on comers — notably screeching
Russians and other Slavs, such as Belorus girl champion Victoria
Azarenka, who almost beat Serena in the quarters. The final
against Justine Henin, returning to tennis after an 18-month
layoff during which she did some charity work in Congo (Belgians
feel some responsibility for their broken-down ex-colony),
produced a fine three-setter. In the doubles’ game, American
siblings ruled, with the Bryan brothers winning the gentlemen’s
tournament and the Williams sisters the ladies’. There was a
mixed doubles as well, but I am sorry to admit I did not follow,
and can only report that the altogether attractive team of
Leander Paes and Cara Black won, as they often do. I wanted to
find out how Roger Federer’s charity “hit for Haiti” did. They
raised six hundred thousand, reportedly, though plans for
disbursing it were not available.
